Beyond the Limits: Flexible and Congestion-Aware Cluster Scheduling for the Cloud

Abstract

Workload scheduling in cloud environments often relies on simplistic assumptions about application resource needs and hardware utilization. Overlooking application-level performance objectives and hardware resource contention that leads to inefficient resource usage and degraded performance. This paper addresses two key limitations of current approaches. First, unnecessarily strict enforcement of service level objectives (SLOs) often leads to resource underutilization and poor energy efficiency. Second, lack of congestion awareness in shared resources such as last-level cache (LLC) and memory bandwidth. In this paper, we propose two complementary strategies to address these limitations: (i) integrating soft SLO limits that allow controlled overcommitment and tolerate minor, transient violations to improve cluster efficiency, and (ii) introducing resource-aware scheduling and rescheduling based on real-time congestion insights for shared resources such as last-level cache (LLC) and memory bandwidth. Our results show that soft SLO limits reduce corrective rescheduling actions by 49% compared to hard-limit approaches while maintaining acceptable performance guarantees. Additionally, resource-aware scheduling decreases node-level congestion by 8% and further mitigates SLO violations, demonstrating the effectiveness of incorporating application-level flexibility and hardware-level insights into scheduling and rescheduling decisions.